Wood iPhone Dock/Amplifier--No Speakers

I am going to start off by saying that I completely ripped this idea off. Please see www.koostik.com to view the original.

So in viewing this website, I saw the amazing results that a ported dock could produce in terms of amplification off of just the crumby internal speaker on an iphone. In studying the photos on the website I decided that this could be recreated easily enough with a plunge router and a few mdf templates.

I used my iphone 4 to get the basic dimensions for the templates, marked off a block of pine with center lines, used a forestner bit to get rid of the waste, and then made a nice little iphone 4 shaped hole. Then I used a circle cutting jig to route some channels to the speakers on the iphone. Please note that on the iphone 4 the internal speaker is only on the right, so you need to create a gap under the iphone connecting the ports for sound to come out both sides. With that completed, I glued the block back together and cut speaker holes.

The first pic is just the pine block in working condition. The others are after I made it a bit more visually appealing. Obviously, there are some visible errors in the depth setting for plunge routing that I made (it was my first time), but I think I can do better the next time around.

I am posting this because I am sure many of you out there have kids, significant others, office mates, or maybe even pets that have iphones. I made some really nice ipod docks last year for christmas with amps and speakers and such, and they cost a small fortune to make. This is a project that you could batch out in a weekend, including the time to make the templates, and thin out the burgeoning pile of offcuts and scrap in your garage as well. I made mine out of a piece of pine that had been sitting in the garage for 5 years that I was tired of looking at and then ironed on some walnut veneer.

As an amplifier, the results are pretty impressive. Mine are very similar to those shown on the website above in the video on the about page. My iPhone can easily produce enough sound to fill a 15×25 living room with music at a reasonable volume.

(For those interested, the drawing in the first few pics is part of a tattoo for someone I know. The female is being consumed in the flames of her situation and the covered part of the drawing is her rising as a phoenix from the flames. I really want to cut this as marquetry…wish me luck.)

I will try to take a stab at one of these tonight. I stupidly didn’t take any pictures of that part and it is obviously the most important part. One thing I did differently, at least from what i can see in the photos, is I just cut the channels/ports in the block and glued it back together and cut the speaker holes afterward. In my mind this was the easiest way to make sure I didn’t end up with holes not matching up.

My speaker holes are flat bottomed. I would like to make them rounded but I didn’t have a set of template bushings for my new plunge router and didn’t want to spend the $50.00 to get a rounded bit with a bearing so I decided that for a proof of concept I would go with the flat bottomed holes. Obviously, I haven’t compared the sound between the two, but I suspect that you would need an oscilloscope or your resident audiophile to tell the difference.

Ah – ok, I think I can imagine the process then. I might try creating the speaker holes on the lathe as two offset turnings (you can probably imagine how that would work based off of this picture of my grease box):

Although for something as wide as this, it might be a little too whompy.

I realize I’m a little late to this party having just been accepted to the Forum. As the designer / inventor / manufacturer of the koostik which is the basis for this discussion; I’m flattered for the interest. The product we sell on our site: www.koostik.com is the result of about 50 prototypes evolving to the design we now produce. There is incidentally, a pronounced difference in the sound quality and projection we get from milling the hemispherical chambers as opposed to flat bottom chambers (an idea we explored in earlier versions). And yes, sound does come from both speakers even though the iPhone only has a single speaker. On the 3G and 3GS models, the speaker is on the left side bottom. On the newer iPhone 4 it is on the right side bottom. Hence, the design works equally well for both. The relationship of the diameter of the faceplate holes in relation to the diameter of the hemispherical sound chambers is also critical to the final sound quality.

He actually has sketchup plans available for download and the method of construction is very similar to what I used. I used a jasper circle cutting jig to punch the holes and used it as well to cut the channels, though i suspect that having rounded sound channels is not really necessary. As for rounding out the bottom of the speaker, I didn’t do this. I looked at trying something like a core box bit and a template, but this was just my proof of concept, so I didn’t go to the trouble.

As for the ports and speaker holes: I think the holes are around 2 1/8” in diameter and the ports are the width of a 1/4 upcut bit. I think the sketchup drawing will explain a lot of it. As always, I want to point out that I didn’t come up with this idea and since I built this, Jim(koostik) of koostik.com has designed several additional products that I think are pretty slick.

Great stuff man. I made a few of these last summer when I saw the idea online and they work great and are a hit with my family. We took one camping and I use one in “The Shop” to hear the good wife call me for diner. She says” if you had a washroom out there, you would never come in the house” I;-D ShopTillYouDrop.